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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 4 Hansard (3 April) . . Page.. 1373 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

Some of the recommendations of this report are quietly being adopted; others, perhaps more profound, will not even be addressed. For example, it appears Community Housing Canberra may be given the power to buy and sell public assets in order to become an affordable housing developer/landlord across Canberra. But what is the government's response, say, to recommendation 18 to "explore construction, sale and leaseback options to contribute to affordable housing outcomes, accompanied by planning and other concessions recommended in this report"or recommendation 29 "that all legislation relating to land and planning be amended to include references to support increased provision of affordable housing"?

Furthermore, key overall recommendations that an affordable housing statement should be released with every budget and that affordable housing providers should be established in order to retain the community benefits of affordable housing are fundamental to this task force report. Yet we have no idea whether the government will pursue this strategy.

On Tuesday I asked Mr Corbell a question about affordable housing in the Metropolitan development across the road from the Lakeside. While asserting that Mr Wood has carriage of the recommendations and implementations of the Affordable Housing Task Force-and, after all, it was a ministerial task force set up by Mr Wood-Mr Corbell conceded that "there is a clear synergy between housing policy and planning policy, when it comes to addressing issues of affordability". He then went on to advise us that "the government is considering a range of recommendations from the Affordable Housing Task Force". He said that it is "not going to seek to do things in a piecemeal or ad hoc manner. The government is developing a holistic approach to addressing the issue of affordability".

Yesterday, when the issue came up again, Minister Wood argued that he had never proposed to come back with a consolidated government response. The reason, it seems, is that "there were lots of controversial issues in that"and "not everything"that was in the report "was absolutely agreed"- by the government, perhaps, or by members of the task force".

Given that, according to Mr Corbell and Mr Wood, government is not going to address things in a piecemeal way, then the fact that a ministerial task force comes forward with some controversial recommendations surely does not mean government should not respond. Rather, I would have thought the reverse would be the case.

The housing minister has set up a task force consisting of key industry, government and community sector representatives to investigate the provision of affordable housing. Perhaps this is one of the biggest issues facing the cities of Australia; it is a question which is fundamental to the goals of equity and opportunity.

Now that the task force has reported, this government's approach is to pick over the report and select a few recommendations that can be negotiated through cabinet without ever being up-front about how and why it is making those decisions. I think this shows a very cavalier response to the work of everyone who contributed to the task force-people whose time is extremely valuable-as well as the task force itself, and it offers no

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